Using Google to save time on your folklore paper.

Bibliographies.
go to google and type this in "citation last name, first name "a handful of words from the title"
example: citation Glassie, Henry "spirit of folk art"
chances are good that you'll come up with the work in someone else's bibliography online. cut and paste into your own.
chances are actually pretty good they'll already by in Chicago-style format.
Unless they're from the JAF itself for some reason.

Tangental Ideas you've already read.
Assuming you the sort of idiot that doesn't doesn't write page numbers in the reading notes (like me), google the name of the author and the idea you want to express. example: Bendix, Regina negotiation of tradition chances are someone else has already covered similar territory and if you really lucky have cited it in JAF format (Bendix 1997: 23) But here's the important second part, Ed. Make sure you actually go to the library and check out the book to make sure that that is what it actually says on page 23. Chances are good that if your professor has read this blog, he's going to do the same thing.

Evidence of the value of folklore, here, in the now.

Two stories in the news struck me as releveant to this thing we do.

The first was a episode of "This American Life" two weeks ago on NPR. I like the show a lot: for inexplicable some reason, it's mix of amateur ethnography and GenX snarkiness appeals to me. :-) Two weeks ago they aired a show called "Back from the dead", one of the stories (called "Flood Lights") was about the revival of the High School football season in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Now you need to understand that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina there is no Bay St. Louis, Mississippi anymore. Still the High School team assembled a motley crew -a la the Bad News Bears- to start up the season again. In many ways, it seems incongruous—nay ridiculous—that there would be such a desire to play fucking football, and admittedly Football does not normally qualify as "folklife" or "folklore". But, in Bay St. Louis it had been elevated to the level of ritual. And in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it became a galvanizing force for the community and a much needed return to normalcy. Listening to this compelling tale reminded me that what we study is endemic, a part of the core of who we are even in these complicated -and often shallow times. Sometimes these little rituals, these quirks of small communities, can suddenly be really important. (to hear the story in real audio click here and fast forward to 39:30)

Second, and much sadder, is this NPR news story today: "Sentencing is expected Tuesday for Chai Soua Vang in the murder of six deer hunters last year. The shooting in northern Wisconsin followed a racially charged trespassing confrontation between Vang, who is Hmong, and the men. The tension lingers as hunters prepare for this year's hunting season." seems I can't get through a week this semester without reading something Hmong culture. Listening to the story it's obvious that Northern Wisconsin has a cultural identity and cultural immigration issues (beyond this case which may be precisely what the media has intimated it to be) It is in these instances that the plain practical value of what we do (as well as anthropologists, sociologists and that like) becomes readily, painfully, apparent. link

Dammit! Is this my next paper...or just another windmill?

I am convinced Apple gets most of their marketing ideas from heroin dealers. They constantly screw with you (and their resellers --notice they don't call them 'dealers') but never so much that you'll say "screw you, I am going to the other side".

Obviously in recent posts, I have been thinking about capitalism as an analogy of Orwell's 1984.

Apple, and it's devotes, have always loved to paint Microsoft (or M$) as "Big Brother". Against this backdrop Apple paints themselves as a technological Winston Smith (and hey if you believe a tacky homemade quilt can be a metaphor for "the secret language of women" I think it's safe to say you'll dance to anything). But I think in reality they may actually be O'brien.

All this makes this once very cool commercial (directed by Ridley Scott, who at the time had just finished Blade Runner) suddenly poignant.

I wonder if the girl's name was Julia.

Oh one last thing. If you like to learn more about the early days of Apple just go to (I shit you not) folklore.org

and dig their slogan: “History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.” -- George Santayana

Indeed the past is truly created in the present.

Charles Kurult: Ethno-jingoist

Riding up to Huntington County last weekend I was listening to Charles Kurult's "on the road". A book on CD that was considerably shorter than I had hoped. The CD was largely a collection of TV pieces he had done, with a brief intro read by his brother. Charles travelled the country looking for human interest stories, things that demonstrated "all that was good in all of us". In many ways he was an ethnographer. Witness his story on the man in Big Fork, Montana, who builds birch bark canoes, by hand, with axe and maul and pocket knife, and teaches his grandchildren to do the same. Chester Cornett, only saner, the rugged individualist who helped define this country. Or the retired judge who goes fishing for tiny brook trout "not because I think that fishing is so very important, but because I suspect that most the affairs of man are equally unimportant".

The book starts out as human interest and quickly becomes ethnography—it's not a long way to fall really—but later, with the tri-fecta of freedom of religion and speech in 17th century Rhode Island, the story of the Declaration of independence, and the story of Henry Ford, does it make it's transition into pure jingoism. Right down to the musical interludes of "fanfare for the common man" and the national anthem.

Suddenly, public folklore made sense to me. Or rather, the rather alien concept of "why would a government fund such an obviously liberal and non-conformist, non-hegemenous organization". It's because it presents folklore that can be used in decidedly jingoist terms. Abrahams is wrong if he thinks that there are merely phantoms of Romantic Nationalism about, they are not just "phantoms", they are the backbone of our support. What sucks is that, though I am the cynical-boy about all this, I am also not the only one who things this way. Apparently this has been going on for some time.